Churchill: The importance of slowing down

Reconsidering the idea of blue laws

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The New Jersey shopping hub, frenzied on other days of the week, is eerily quiet on Sundays, the vast parking lots outside its malls left empty and lonely. Bergen County, you see, is one of the few places in the country that still forbids Sunday shopping.

Until relatively recently, I was one of the many people who looked with scorn at such laws, which were largely repealed in the 1970s and 1980s. The old, so-called blue laws that restricted Sunday activities felt archaic, if not Puritan. What about separation of church and state? How dare government tell me when I can shop for clothing or buy beer?

But I'm beginning to reconsider.

I'm not saying we should reimpose Sunday shopping restrictions, which surely are inconvenient in a time-strapped society like ours. Almost everywhere in this country, at least, the most restrictive blue laws are done and gone.

Yet we should at least acknowledge that throwing away Sunday shopping restrictions was not a clear-cut progress. The movement was part and parcel of broader trends that ditched the "moral economy" and prioritized hyper-consumerism, convenience and free-market absolutism — often with bad consequences for workers, families and communities.

Unions favored blue laws for a reason: The restrictions humanely gave lower-wage retail workers a respite, allowing them time with their spouses and children. In fact, the shift toward extended retail hours is among the reasons Americans continue to work so many more hours than employees in countries, including in Europe, where laws restricting shopping hours are more common.

Blue laws also made it easier for small businesses to compete against national chains. It's nothing for big-box stores to be open on Sundays; for family-run businesses, doing so is an intolerable toll.

Mark Yonally, an owner of B. Lodge & Co. in downtown Albany, said he sometimes feels pressured to open the clothing store on Sundays, but he resists for the sake of his family, employees — and sanity. Nobody can work all the time. Rest is necessary.

"I'm sure we're missing out on business," Yonally told me. "But we need time to get together as a family. We need a day."

Blue laws that imposed general shopping restrictions were struck down by the New York Court of Appeals in 1976, but they were fading by then anyway and not without reason. Two-income families and longer commutes were making families more pressed for time. Plus, union influence was declining and secularism was rising.

Setting a day aside for rest — and prayer — comes from religious traditions, of course, the notion being that quiet time is necessary not only for honoring God but for honoring the godly part of ourselves. As with most religious traditions, there's deep wisdom there; it really is easy to get lost in a constant flurry of busyness and to neglect what really matters.

In "A Day Apart," a book that examined the importance of the Sabbath in religious traditions, the late Albany writer Christopher Ringwald put it thusly: "Taking a day of rest protects us from ourselves, from our urge to always be doing, improving, earning, getting, spending, having, consuming — all the ways we hurry on toward death."

Ringwald wrote convincingly of how a day of rest is an ancient tradition that nevertheless aligns with modern needs and goals — it is surely good for the environment — and how the practice builds family and community by giving us the space for both. "The Sabbath makes neighborhoods," he wrote. "It anchors communities in time and place. It counters the fluid mechanics of consumer culture."

A person doesn't need to be religious to observe a sort of Sabbath. Just because stores are open doesn't mean we have to fill them.

We can all choose a day when we, as much as possible, refuse to work or at least attempt to take it easy. We can put away our phones, disconnect from social media, spend time with the people we love and remember why home matters. Being our best selves is about much more than working and spending.

Churchill is one of the most well-known names, and faces, at the Times Union. His columns - published on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays - are shared heavily on social media and have won several awards. Churchill studied English and history at the University of Texas before beginning his journalism career at small weeklies in Maine, later working at the Biddeford Journal Tribune, Waterville Morning Sentinel and Kennebec Journal newspapers. He started at the Times Union as a business writer in 2007 and became a columnist in 2012.